U N I T E D N A T I O N S
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN)

GUINEA: Young refugees team up against drug abuse

ALBADARIA, GUINEA, 21 May (IRIN) - The acronyms littered on walls and
signposts bear testimony to the work NGOs and UN agencies have been doing to
help make life livable for refugees in southern Guinea. From medical centres
to latrines, from canteens to technical schools, most essential services
were initiated by the humanitarian community.

But the people spearheading the fight against drugs in Kountaya, one of the
refugee camps in Albadaria, southern Guinea, are neither NGO officials nor
UN staffers. Their Community Action Against Drug Abuse (CAADA), is an
association formed by refugees themselves.

“We found out that there was a gap NGOs weren’t paying much attention to:
drug abuse,” says CAADA’s head, Chernoh Chargha. He and his peers, he adds,
have more reasons than enough to become drug-fighters. “Drugs were one of
the reasons why we are refugees,” he explains. Moreover, many of the young
refugees brought the habit with them or turned to drugs because of the
experiences they went through.

There is no shortage of documentation on drug abuse by fighters in the civil
wars that gripped Sierra Leone - up to last year - and Liberia. The
atrocities they committed helped fuel some of the biggest population
movements in West Africa since the Biafra War in Nigeria in 1967-1970.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled Sierra Leone and Liberia. Once they
crossed borders, it was almost like their previous lives had been blotted
out. They were no longer teachers, cooks, engineers, farmers or nurses, just
refugees. Chernoh told IRIN, his life before refugee status included working
with Amnesty International and Prison Watch, plus a stint as a security
investigator with Sierra Leone’s national diamond mining company. He was
working as a psychosocial therapist in the eastern district of Kono, when
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels overran the area, forcing him to
join the exodus.

On arriving in Guinea in 1998, he said, he realized that drug abuse was a
major problem in the camps, so he and some of his peers decided to do
something about it. “We didn’t want to leave everything to the NGOs,” he
said. “We wanted to do something for ourselves, so we formed an association
to see how we could work with the community.”

A consultative committee made up of religious leaders, women and other
personalities helped guide the formation of the association, which now has
78 members, 48 male and 30 female. Six Guineans are among them, including
Sassouboye Kamano, who was displaced by cross-border attacks on southern
Guinea in late 200-early 2001. He was in Kissidougou, some 90 km away, when
he heard of the work CAADA was doing and decided to come and join the group,
he said.

CAADA has been raising awareness about drug abuse - as well as STDs and
HIV - through community discussions, role playing and peer counseling.
Sensitisation starts with association members themselves. “To change ideas
we have to change ourselves, so we started with ourselves and then went on
to sensitise others,” Chernoh said.

“Everything here is out of our own effort,” he said with a twinge of pride.
“We done it all by ourselves.”

But sustaining the effort would require assistance, he admits. They need
help to buy equipment such as megaphones to get their message across to more
people. Moreover, keeping young people away from drugs also requires giving
them alternatives.

Many of the young people in the camp come from the diamond mining district
of Kono, “but there are no diamonds in the camp,” Chernoh said. The result,
he added, was hundreds of idle youths extremely vulnerable to the
temptations of marijuana, diazepam or glue, to name a few of the more common
substances abused.

One of the things CAADA did was to persuade some of the carpenters and
tailors in the camp to take on youths as apprentices. However, the number of
artisans who can ply their trade in the refugees camps is small, so the
number of youths they can take on is limited.

What CAADA would like, Chernoh says, is help in the form of
income-generating projects for young people.

Will their fight against drug abuse end when they and the other refugees
pack up their belongings and join the convoys that have been taking their
people back to Sierra Leone? The young psychosocial therapist doesn’t think
so.

“We already have two or three of our members who have gone back to Sierra
Leone,” he says. “I also aim to see how we can continue our work there.”

[ENDS]

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